Conrad Black: The Republicans send in the clowns

The first words Fidel Castro has ever uttered that I have agreed with are those recently published on his blog, in which he opined that the current U.S. Republican nomination race is one of the most inane and stupid events in modern world history. On its record, the Obama administration should be sent packing, bag and baggage. It will have issued $5-trillion of new debt in one term, and publicly held federal debt as a percentage of GDP will have increased from under 50% to about 80%. It is a regime of narcissistic posturing and confidence tricks and bad policy options that richly deserves and badly needs a severe thrashing at the polls, as did its arrogant, bone-headed predecessor and the louche, rascality-tainted latter Clinton road-show that preceded that. Instead, there could well be only the second occurrence of three consecutive two-term administrations in the country’s history (after Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, the scarcely comparable principal authors of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Monroe Doctrine, 1801-1825).

The most disturbing aspect of this election is that despite the parlous condition of the country and the profound vulnerability of the incumbent, the best Republican candidates — Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, and Haley Barbour — have sat it out. As I keep lamenting, in the terrible year 1968, with assassinations, riots, 550,000 draftees in Vietnam and 200 to 400 of them returning in body bags every week, at one time or another, Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan were all running for president, and all of them were more impressive than the present contestants.

Of the surviving Republican contenders, Ron Paul is a sound monetarist and a doughty libertarian, but he is a 76-year old kook who, like President Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, thinks 9/11 was the chickens coming home to roost. Newt Gingrich is a completely unfeasible flake. Rick Santorum is consistent, courageous, and believably argues for fiscal encouragement of families and the creation of jobs that add value to the economy and not just more lawyers and consultants and service-industry leeches. But he has his feet stuck in cement on abortion and same-sex marriage, and early in the campaign even criticized contraception. These shouldn’t be partisan issues at all, and any candidate who gets into them has self-detonating grenades strapped to his torso, front and back. Mitt Romney is more presentable and has a successful private-sector career behind him, but is afflicted by plasticity and has faced in all four directions on most issues.

It has been dismal, though at times amusing, to see the national media pick off every alternative to Romney who has raised his or her head: Michele Bachmann, with her opposition to inoculations in schools; Rick Perry with “Oops” as he forgot which cabinet department he wanted to abolish, and dilated on the fun of jogging with a handgun; Herman(ator) Cain and his peccadilloes (though at least he got them all talking about tax simplification); Newt with his $1.6-million for teaching “history” at Freddie Mac, and his plan to colonize the moon. As each has arisen, the giggly snipers of The New York Times and the “mainstream” (i.e. liberal) networks have plinked joyfully away until another bullet-riddled head plopped back behind the parapet. Newt is only sustained by casino owner Sheldon Adelman, who is just trying to stop Mitt, for whom the liberal media have been sharpening their knives for five years (with particular solicitude for the late Romney family dog, Seamus, an Irish Setter infamously conveyed from Boston to Montreal on the roof of the candidate’s station wagon in a dog crate in 1983).

There are two factors that could still make it an interesting election. First, the Republicans might just fail to anoint a candidate before the convention, so dispiriting is the choice, and the convention could then pick a more promising dark horse. (The last time this happened was the Democrats’ choice of John W. Davis after 102 ballots in 1924. The last time it worked was Warren Gamaliel Harding in 1920 (in the original “smoke-filled room,” impossible of course in these smoke-free times).

And, second, Barack Obama is emerging as not so much the incompetent he has appeared for most of his term, but as purposeful, radical in fact, and even possibly sinister.

Not more than about 10% of the population have any real problem with birth control (and most of the Catholic bishops are not among them). It would have been very easy for Mr. Obama and his allies to assure contraceptive costs to any category of working person. But trying to force the Roman Catholic Church’s many affiliated institutions to insure their employees’ use of contraceptive prescriptions and abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization treatments as well was unconstitutional (First Amendment religious rights), and a premeditated assault on a formidable, and not previously hostile, institution. It is astonishingly belligerent and politically risky to launch such an attack on the nation’s largest church at the publicly proclaimed behest of the most strident feticidal organizations in the country. There was no practical reason for it; it is naked aggression against the religious sector of American life, a big transformative gamble.

The president’s budget for fiscal year 2013 claims that there will be deficit reduction, based on drastic defense cuts that his own Defense secretary, Leon Panetta, says will not occur; on wild projections of economic growth of up to more than 4% per annum that are pure fantasy; and on a tax war against the 3% of Americans who pay more in personal income taxes than the other 97%. Thus are promised 100% increases in taxes on capital gains and dividends; almost 30% on estates; the end of the payroll tax reduction; and, as touted by Omaha’s noisiest export since the B-29, (politically) useful idiot Warren Buffett, an as yet unspecified “global minimum tax.”

It is all as ludicrous as Fidel Castro, the world authority on misrule, claims. If Obama loses, it will be because the Republicans jump the rails on this corrupt, farcical nominating process and draft a serious candidate on a serious platform. If he wins, it will be a disaster to delight America’s critics, and will be repealed by a nation chastened back to its senses in 2016.